“The Day of the Cynics” derives from the fact that the motives of many on both sides of the issue of war vs. peace in Iraq are less than pure. (This should not be misconstrued as impugning the motives of individual citizens opposed to war. The discussion is about the power elements involved in this issue.) Much of the program deals with the dynamic of the dollar vs. the euro-the two major currencies struggling for dominance as the reserve currency of choice. OPEC oil is priced in dollars, greatly bolstering the dollar as a reserve currency. Iraq, on the other hand, has begun pricing its oil in euros and is holding euros as its primary element of currency reserves. The dollar/euro issue is at the core of the confrontation between Europe and the US over Iraq.

Program Highlights Include: The history of the Jeddah Agreement, which anticipates the dollar/euro struggle over Middle East oil reserves; France’s commercial deals with Iraq; the role of Total (the French oil company) in Iraqi oil exploration; German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer’s background as a fellow traveler of the RAF (an extreme left-wing terrorist group that was supported by Nazi financier and ODESSA operative Francois Genoud); the prediction of counter-terror experts that Osama bin Laden would gain support from an American war in Iraq; George Bush’s slashing of benefits to military veterans and the families of active-duty service personnel; Republican pundit Ann Coulter’s verbal assault on a disabled Vietnam war veteran; the prominence of Ramsey Clark (who played a significant role in covering up the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King) in the “peace” movement.

1. Although the Bush administration has maintained that oil is NOT one of the reasons for its forthcoming adventure in Iraq, that assessment is less than candid. One of the most important aspects of the US/Iraq confrontation concerns the fact that Iraq became the first OPEC nation to price its oil in euros-a serious departure from OPEC policy, as established by the US and Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. “Oil has been a major US concern about Iraq in internal and unpublicized documents, since the start of this Administration, and indeed earlier. But the need to dominate oil from Iraq is also deeply intertwined with the defense of the dollar. Its current strength is supported by OPEC’s requirement (secured by a secret agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia) that all OPEC oil sales be denominated in dollars. This requirement is currently threatened by the desire of some OPEC countries to allow OPEC oil sales to be paid in euros.” (“Bush’s Deep Reasons for War on Iraq: Oil, Petrodollars, and the OPEC Euro Question” by Peter Dale Scott; p. 1.)

2. “As early as April 1997, a report from the James A. Baker Institute of Public Policy at Rice University addressed the problem of ‘energy security’ for the United States, and noted that the US was increasingly threatened by oil shortages in the face of the inability of oil supplies to keep up with world demand. In particular the report addressed ‘The Threat of Iraq and Iran’ to the free flow of oil out of the Middle East. It concluded that Saddam Hussein was still a threat to Middle Eastern security and still had the military capability to exercise force beyond Iraq’s borders.” (Idem.)

3. “The Bush Administration returned to this theme as soon as it took office in 2001, by adopting, some say commissioning, a second report from the same Institute. (This Task Force Report was co-sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, another group historically concerned about US access to overseas oil resources.) As reported by the Scotland Sunday Herald (10/6/02). ‘President’s Bush’s Cabinet agreed in April 2001 that ‘Iraq remains a destabilizing influence to the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East’ and because this is an unacceptable risk to the US ‘military intervention’ is necessary. Vice-president Dick Cheney, who chairs the White House Energy Policy Development Group, commissioned a report on ‘energy security’ from the Baker Institute for Public Policy, a think-tank set up by James Baker, the former US secretary of state under George Bush Sr.'” (Idem.)

4. ” ‘The report, Strategic Energy Policy Challenges For the 21st Century, concludes: ‘The United States remains a prisoner of its energy dilemma. Iraq remains a de-stabilizing influence to . . . the flow of oil to international markets from the Middle East. Saddam Hussein has also demonstrated a willingness to threaten to use the oil weapon and to use his own export program to manipulate oil markets. Therefore the US should conduct an immediate policy review toward Iraq including military, energy, economic and political/diplomatic assessments. ‘The United States should then develop an integrated strategy with key allies in Europe and Asia, and with key countries in the Middle East, to restate goals with respect to Iraqi policy and to restore a cohesive coalition of key allies.'” (Ibid.; pp. 1-2.)

5. ” ‘Baker, who delivered the recommendations to Cheney, the former chief executive of Texas oil firm Halliburton, was advised by Kenneth Lay, the disgraced former chief executive of Enron, the US energy giant which went bankrupt after carrying out massive accountancy fraud.’ [The Sunday Herald did not mention that the report begins with references to ‘recent energy price spikes’ and ‘electricity outages in California,’ which we now know were engineered by Enron market manipulations for which two Enron energy traders have since pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges (Forbes, 2/5/2003).]” (Ibid.; p. 2.)

6. “Behind the acknowledged concern about the ‘free flow’ of Persian Gulf oil are other motives. Following the recommendations of the Task Force Report, the Bush administration wishes to increase international (which may well turn out to mean US) investment in the under-developed Iraq oilfields. On 1/16/03, the Wall Street Journal reported that officials from the White House, State Department, and Department of Defense have been meeting informally with executives from Halliburton, Schlumberger, ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and ConocoPhillips to plan the post-war expansion of oil production from Iraq (whose oilfields were largely held by US companies prior to their nationalization). The Journal story has since been denied by Administration officials; but, as the Guardian noted on 1/27/03, ‘It stretches credulity somewhat to imagine that the subject has never been broached.'” (Idem.)

7. “It is worth pointing out that Saddam Hussein already has offered exploratory concessions (which remained inactive because of the UN sanctions) to France, China, Russia, Brazil, Italy, and Malaysia. If Saddam is replaced by a new client regime, it seems likely that these concessions will be superseded, although there are reports that the US has offered France, Russia and China a share of post-war Iraqi oil, as an inducement to get their support in the Security Council. Last September former CIA chief Woolsey threatened in the Washington Post (9/15/02) that the price for participation by France and Russia in the post-war Iraq oil bonanza should be their support for ‘regime change.’ It would not take much of such menacing talk from official sources to turn the Bush campaign against Iraq into a campaign against Europe.” (Idem.)

8. “Iraq’s proven oil reserves are 113 billion barrels, the second largest in the world after Saudi Arabia, and eleven percent of the world’s total. The total reserves could be 200 million barrels or more, all of it relatively easy and cheap to extract. Thus increasing Iraqi oil production will diminish the market pressure on oil-importing countries like the US. It will also weaken the power of OPEC to influence oil markets by decisions to restrict output. Indeed, were Iraqi oil production to expand to near its capacity, the quotas established by OPEC would cease to be honored in today’s market.” (Idem.)

9. “But the US is not interested in oil from Iraq, it is concerned to maintain political dominance over all the oil-producing countries of the region. Secretary of State Colin Powell gave a glimpse of US intentions when he told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 6 that success in the Iraq war ‘could fundamentally reshape that region in a powerful, positive way that will enhance U.S. interests.’ In conceding that it will be necessary to station US troops in occupied Iraq for the foreseeable future, the US is serving notice that the US will reassert its presence as the dominant military power in the region.” (Idem.)

10. Professor Scott discusses the pricing of Middle Eastern oil in dollars and the manner in which that dictates the primacy of the dollar as a reserve currency. (Recall that in the programs discussing the euro and the dollar, Mr. Emory has discussed the EMU as the fulfillment of the pan-German theorist Friedrich List’s formula for German world domination. From the beginning of the EMU, For The Record has stressed that the creation of the euro could do serious damage to the unbalanced US economy by eroding the dollar’s stature as a reserve currency. “Dominance of Middle Eastern oil will mean in effect maintaining dollar hegemony over the world oil economy. Given its present strategies, the US is constrained to demand no less. As I explain in this extract from my book, Drugs, Oil, and War, the present value of the US dollar, unjustified on purely economic grounds, is maintained by political arrangements, one of the chief of which is to ensure that all OPEC oil purchases will continue to be denominated in US dollars. (This commitment of OPEC to dollar oil sales was secured in the 1970’s by a secret agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia, before the two countries began to drift apart over Israel and other issues.)” (Ibid.; pp. 2-3.)

11. “The chief reason why dollars are more than pieces of green paper is that countries all over the world need them for purchases, principally of oil. This requires them in addition to maintain dollar reserves to protect their own currency; and these reserves, when invested, help maintain the current high levels of the US securities markets.” (Ibid.; p. 3.)

12. “As Henry Liu has written vividly in the online Asian Times (4/11/02), ‘World trade is now a game in which the US produces dollars and the rest of the world produces things that dollars can buy. The world’s interlinked economies no longer trade to capture a comparative advantage; they compete in exports to capture needed dollars to service dollar-denominated foreign debts and to accumulate dollar reserves to sustain the exchange value of their domestic currencies. To prevent speculative and manipulative attacks on their currencies, the world’s central banks must acquire and hold dollar reserves in corresponding amounts to their currencies in circulation. The higher the market pressure to devalue a particular currency, the more dollar reserves its central banks must hold. This creates a built-in support for a strong dollar that, in turn, forces the world’s central banks to acquire and hold more dollar reserves, making it stronger. This phenomenon is known as dollar hegemony, which is created by the geopolitically constructed peculiarity that critical commodities, most notably oil, are denominated in dollars because dollars can buy oil. The recycling of petro-dollars is the price the US has extracted from oil-producing countries for US tolerance of the oil-exporting cartel since 1973.'” (Idem.)

13. ” ‘By definition, dollar reserves must be invested in US assets, creating a capital-accounts surplus for the US economy. Even after a year of sharp correction, US stock valuation is still at a 25-year high and trading at a 56 percent premium compared with emerging markets.'” (Idem.)

14. Assessing the dollar’s prospects in the future, Professor Scott takes note of the growing trade and current accounts deficits in this country, and the fact that these deficits are going to damage the US economically, and drive down the dollar as a reserve currency. As the passage quoted here notes, it was at the end of the second Reagan Administration that this country became a net debtor nation. In light of previous discussion, this is of more than passing interest. The personnel from the Reagan administration were selected by Helene von Damm, protégé of Otto Von Bolschwing. By plunging the US in debt and bankrupting the Soviet Union, the Reagan Administrations placed the US in its current position, to the advantage of the Underground Reich. (This process is described at greater length in RFA#37-available from Spitfire.) “But central bankers around the world do not expect either the US dollar or the US stock markets to sustain their current levels. As William Greider in The Nation (9/23/02) has pointed out: ‘US economy’s net foreign indebtedness-the accumulation of two decades of running larger and larger trade deficits-will reach nearly 25 percent of US GDP this year, or roughly $2.5 trillion. Fifteen years ago, it was zero. Before America’s net balance of foreign assets turned negative, in 1988, the United States was a creditor nation itself, investing and lending vast capital to others, always more than it borrowed. Now the trend line looks most alarming. If the deficits persist around the current level of $400 billion a year or grow larger, the total US indebtedness should reach $3.5 trillion in three years or so. Within a decade, it would total 50 percent of GDP.'” (Idem.)

15. In light of the current nuclear crisis developing in North Korea, it is interesting to contemplate the possible effects that an uncontrolled escalation of these events could have on the Japanese economy. In turn, a Japanese collapse could have a tremendous effect on the US economy, and a very negative one at that. “There is also a major potential threat to the overpriced dollar in Japan’s unresolved deflationary crisis. As observers like Lawrence A. Joyce have commented, the dollar would take a major pummeling if the Japanese government (as seems quite possible) were suddenly required to fulfil its legal obligations to bail out failed Japanese banks (which could easily happen if a sustained scarcity of oil were to keep oil prices at $40.00 a barrel or higher): ‘There is only one place where the Japanese government can get enough money to bail out its banking system: The Japanese government owns about 15% of our U.S. Treasury securities. And it would have to start selling them if it found itself facing a major banking crisis.'” (Idem.)

16. ” ‘That would send the already ailing dollar down even further. And the initiation of a sale of our Treasury securities by Japan, of course, would immediately trigger a worldwide stampede to do the same before the securities become worth only a fraction of what they were purchased for. At the same time, interest rates in the U.S. would immediately go through the roof.'” (Ibid.; pp. 3-4.)

17. “Washington is of course aware of these problems, and believes that overwhelming military strength and the will to use it supply the answer, persuading or forcing other countries to support the dollar at its artificial level as they key to their own security. In an article entitled ‘Asia: the Military-Market Link,’ and published by the U.S. Naval Institute in January 2002, Professor Thomas Barnett of the US Naval War College, wrote: ‘We trade little pieces of paper (our currency, in the form of a trade deficit) for Asia’s amazing array of products and services. We are smart enough to know this is a patently unfair deal unless we offer something of great value along with those little pieces of paper. That product is a strong US Pacific Fleet, which squares the transaction nicely.'” (Ibid.; p. 4.)

18. “There is some merit to this argument with respect to friendly countries like Japan, whose defense costs have been lowered by the US presence in Asia. But of course the Islamic countries of the world are less likely to appreciate the ‘great value’ of a threatening US presence. Instead they are more likely to follow the example of Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, and turn to the Islamic gold dinar as a way to diminish dollar hegemony in world markets and increase the power of Islamic nations to challenge US policies. The United States has at present little reason to fear a challenge to the dollar from Malaysia. But Malaysia is an Islamic country; and the US has every reason to fear a similar challenge from the Islamic nations in OPEC, were they to force OPEC to cease OPEC oil sales in dollars, and denominate them instead in euros.” (Idem.)

19. “Iraq was one of the first OPEC countries, in 2000, to convert its reserves from dollars to euros. At the time a commentator for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty predicted that Saddam’s political act ‘will cost Iraq millions in lost revenue.’ In fact, Iraq has profited handsomely from the 17 percent gain in the value of the euro against the dollar in that time. Other countries have gradually been climbing on to the euro bandwagon. An article in the Iran Financial News, 8/25/02, revealed that more than half of Iran’s Forex Reserve Fund assets had been converted from dollars to euros. In 2002, China began diversifying its currency reserves away from dollars into euros. According to Business Week (2/17/03), Russia’s Central Bank in the past year has doubled its euro holdings to 20 percent of its $48 billion foreign exchange reserves. And for a very good reason, according to its First Deputy Chairman Oleg Vyugin: ‘Returns on dollar instruments are very low now. Other currency instruments pay more.'” (Idem.)

20. As was predicted in FTRs 85, 100, 126, the Euro is indeed eating into the dollar’s status as a reserve currency. “Business Week continues: ‘The story is the same across the globe. Money traders say that institutions as diverse as Bank of Canada, People’s Bank of China, and Central Bank of Taiwan are giving more weight to the European currency. By the end of this year, they predict, the euro could account for 20% of global foreign currency reserves, which today amount to a cool $2.4 trillion. Little more than a year ago, the euro made up just 10%. ‘No one is saying that the euro’s going to replace the dollar as the premier reserve currency,’ says Michael Klawitter, a currency strategist at WestLB research in London. ‘But it will increase in importance for many central banks. The shift to the euro has big implications for the foreign exchange markets and the U.S. and European economies. Currency specialists say the yawning U.S. current account deficit, now at 5%, is bound to drive the dollar down further, and the euro still higher, over the next two to four years. Although the greenback may stage a short-term recovery once the looming war with Iraq is over, predictions are that it will then continue its downward trend, and that central banks will play their part in the descent. ‘Even if central banks increase their euro holdings by just a few [percent, it will have a major impact in the markets,’ says Klawitter. ‘We’re talking many billions of dollar.'” (Ibid.; pp. 4-5.)

21. “If not deterred, OPEC could follow suit. Libya has been urging for some time that oil be priced in euros rather than dollars. Javad Yarjani, an Iranian senior OPEC official, told a European Union seminar in April 2002 that, despite the problems raised by such a conversion, ‘I believe that OPEC will not discount entirely the possibility of adopting euro pricing and payments in the future. . . ‘” (Ibid.; p. 5.)

22. No hypocrisy is greater than that of Ralph Nader, whose preposterous, fundamentally dishonest campaign was instrumental in placing this administration in power. (For more about multi-millionaire stock investor Ralph Nader and his investments in companies he criticizes, see FTR#264.) “. . . With respect to oil, Ralph Nader has just written, ‘The demand is simple: Stop this war before it starts and immediately establish a same national energy security strategy.’ In fact, one key ingredient of such a strategy, restriction of demand, can be found in saner parts of the Baker Institute reports that the Bush administration has so far chosen to ignore.” (Idem.)

23. The program excerpts sections of a paper by Kevin Coogan discussing the connections between the far right and Islamofascist elements. One of the points of speculation that Kevin engages in concerns the possibility that the fascist/Islamist link-up may be intended to shift the economic power of the Middle Eastern oil-producing nations to financial institutions associated with the far rightists discussed here. “My own belief is that it is less the apparently fantastic and ‘James Bond’-like quality of this analysis that is most difficult to understand. The real difficulty is the utter ignorance of most Westerners (Americans in particular) about the very existence of such people as Francois Genoud. Thus when Ernst Backes, one of Europe’s leading experts in money laundering, told the Luxembourg-based economic journal Plus Minus last year that he believed the financial source of funds for the 9/11 terrorists would ultimately be traced back to Swiss bank accounts established by Genoud, few Americans had any idea what Backes could possibly be talking about. For this same reason there has been virtually no independent investigation into SICO’s Baudoin Dunand’s relationship to Genoud or (for that matter) the role of Syrian-born Muhammad Mardam Bay (believed to be related to a former Syrian foreign minister) has played both as a member of Magnin, Dunand & Associates as well as Bay’s possible links with Genoud. And what does it mean when we are told that Youssef Nada, for example, is believed by Egyptian authorities to have worked for German intelligence in World War II?” (“Report on Islamists, The Far Right, and Al Taqwa” by Kevin Coogan; p. 15.)

24. “It is not at all impossible that networks first developed in the 1930’s and who saw their economic power fantastically multiplied in the wake of the enormous hike in oil prices in 1973 are now engaged in trying to enact a major financial shift away from the dollar and Anglo-American financial networks and to shift the vast wealth of the Muslim oil states into a new Euro-based financial network that would vastly increase the power of those banks and financial interests in Europe associated with elements of far right elites that survived World War II relatively intact.” (Idem.)

25. “If this were at all the case, it would not be a new development. The very same attempt to develop an independent Saudi-German hookup to subvert the U.S. and British domination of the Saudi oil markets was actually attempted in the mid-1950’s. At that time, the Saudi royal family-using the advise of the famous German banker Hjalmar Schacht-attempted to employ Aristotle Onassis to transport Saudi oil on new oil tankers that would be constructed in the shipyards of Germany. This attempt to break the Western oil control over Saudi Arabia was finally blocked by the United States, a story well documented in Jim Hougan’s book Spooks (New York: William Morrow, 1978.)” (Ibid.; pp. 15-16.)

26. “The documentation regarding this complex question is there for anyone who wants to examine it. Of course I am NOT attempting to suggest a simple mono-causal explanation for the current crisis. What I am suggesting is that sooner or later these connections between the far right and groups like the Muslim Brotherhood that began in the 1930’s and continue today will have to become the subject of serious and sober research in order to help us shed new light on the extraordinary circumstances we are living under today.” (Ibid.; p. 16.)

27. Detailing the attempt at gaining control of the Saudi oil wealth alluded to in the conclusion of Kevin’s paper on the von Dohnanyi book, the broadcast sets forth the maneuvering of former Third Reich finance minister Hjalmar Schacht. Note that Schacht was very close to Genoud, as well as to Allen Dulles, a major figure in the establishment of Saudi Arabia and an important engineer of the Bush family’s investments on behalf of the Third Reich. “Another key figure involved in German intrigue in the Middle East was Hjalmar Schacht. He first came to Egypt as General Naguib’s ‘guest of honor’ after the coup against King Farouk. Schacht’s most daring Middle East power-play was the ‘Jiddah Agreement’ between German industry and Saudi Arabia in January 1954. Under the terms of the deal, Saudi Arabia agreed to establish a fleet of supertankers to be built in German shipyards) that would carry Saudi oil around the world. Aristotle Onassis was chosen to manage the shipping side of the operation. Besides making the Ruhr industrialists fantastically wealthy, Jiddah threatened to break the ‘Seven Sisters’ oil companies’ hegemony over the distribution of Middle East oil. The Jiddah Agreement was ultimately blocked by the Western oil cartel with help from the CIA. Yet Allen Dulles’s CIA was surprisingly hesitant to confront Schacht. Robert Maheu, one of the coordinators of the American attack on Jiddah, said of the CIA: ‘You can’t imagine how hard it was to convince them that the national interest was at stake.'” (Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International Copyright 1999 [SC]; Autonomedia; ISBN 1-57027-039-2; p. 383.) One wonders to what extent some of the Bush-related petroleum interests implicated in the background of the 9/11 attacks have proven similarly recalcitrant to the concept of the national interest.

28. In the “cynicism Olympics,” it would be difficult to best the Germans (who, along with the French) are blocking the Bush administration’s oil run in Iraq for domestic political reasons and (possibly) to exercise “diplomacy as the continuation of war by other means.” (For more on this subject, see-among other programs-FTR#’s 395-399.) It should be noted that the current German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, is a former fellow-traveler of the milieu of the RAF/Baader-Meinhoff gang. This milieu, in turn, is inextricably linked with that of the aforementioned Francois Genoud and the Al Taqwa/Islamist milieu involved with 9/11. “In 2001, the German government put on trial your old friend Hans-Joachim Klein, who had been an underground ‘soldier’ in the Revolutionary Cells, an ally of the red Army Faction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The Revolutionary cells [according to author Kelly] helped in the murder of the Israeli Olympic athletes in Munich in 1972, and Klein himself took part in a 1975 joint assassination operation with Carlos the Jackal in which three were killed. During your testimony at Klein’s trial, you were accused of having harbored Red Army Faction members in your Revolutionary Struggle house, the Frankfurt center for the group Revolutionary Struggle, which you co-founded with housemate Daniel ‘Danny the Red’ Cohn-Bendit. You were forced to admit there was some truth in the accusation after it was revealed, as Berman reported, that Margrit Schiller, ‘who had served jail time for her connections to the Red Army Faction,’ had in her memoirs ‘plainly stated that she had spent a ‘few days’ in the early 1970’s living in the Revolutionary house.'” (“Germany’s Tough Guy” by Michael Kelly; Washington Post; 2/12/2003; p. A9.)

29. The center-right government of France is equally cynical with its corporate master-Germany. (Note that Total, the French oil company, is deeply involved with the CDU funding scandal and the complex milieu revealed by that imbroglio.) “The French oil company Total has signed several oil exploration deals with Iraq’s government. France is one of Iraq’s biggest trading partners; it received about $700 million in revenue in 2001 from exports to Iraq. French carmakers Renault and PSA Peugeot Citroen attended Baghdad’s international trade fair last November. As prime minister in the 1970’s, Chirac negotiated with Saddam to sell Iraq France’s nuclear technology and 60 Mirage fighter jets.” (“Chirac Plays to France’s Powerful Past” by Vivienne Walt; USA Today; 2/27/2003; p. 8A.)

30. Noting an observation shared by many, the program discusses the fact that counterterrorism experts feel that Osama bin Laden will benefit from a US attack on Iraq. “Osama bin Laden is likely to gain support and foot soldiers should the U.S. military lead an invasion of Iraq, warn leading counterterrorism experts and a senior U.S. intelligence official. The analysts, whose view that the al-Qaida terror network stands to gain from a U.S. intervention are disputed by Defense Department and White House officials, who say that bin Laden had tailored several recent audio messages to fit with longstanding Arab fears of Western military domination.” (“Al-Qaida Stands to Gain from War, Analysts Say” by Phillip Smucker; San Jose Mercury News; 2/25/2003; p. 7A.)

31. After noting the fact that George Bush has slashed lifetime medical benefits for veterans and shaved federal aid for the schooling of the children of active-duty military personnel, the broadcast highlights the cynicism of right-wing pundit Ann Coulter, who verbally assailed a disabled Vietnam veteran. “She eventually left her job as a commentator on MSNBC after telling a disabled Vietnam vet in a debate, ‘People like you caused us to lose the war.'” (Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an ex-Conservative; by David Brock; Copyright 2002 by David Brock; Three Rivers Press [SC]; 1-4000-4728-5; p. 198.)

32. The program concludes with discussion of the role of Ramsey Clark in leading International Action Center, the parent organization of International ANSWER, a major coalition group that has been organizing demonstrations against the war. Noting that Clark played a paramount role in covering up the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, the program highlights the fact that, in keeping with the cynicism so evident in connection with the Iraq issue, ANSWER staged major events on the weekend of the holiday celebrating Dr. King’s birthday.